Virtualization - which host + guest?

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I'm going to run virtual machine ( guest Linux & Windows ) on linux 64-bit distribution. I tired Open Suse with Xen but snapshot with xen aren't friendly. I will think about VirtualBox but on Centos 5.5 guest takes lots of CPU.

1. Which distribution should I take with VirtualBox (which is free of slow performance) ?

2. Maybe anyone know any other free virtualization solution as good as VirtualBox ? ( in terms of snapshot management )

Best regards, Xentri

user54475

Posted 2010-11-04T03:52:57.183

Reputation: 11

Answers

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RedHat is the king of distros if we're strictly concerned with virtualization. Their Emerging Technology Group is the home of libvirt, virt-manager, virsh, qemu, kvm, and oVirt.

For simple snapshot maintenance you might be out of luck as I'm not currently aware of any gui snapshot management programs. The qemu-img command however has a simple command syntax for managing snapshots of your virtual machines.

snapshot [-l | -a snapshot | -c snapshot | -d snapshot] filename

Parameters to snapshot subcommand:
  'snapshot' is the name of the snapshot to create, apply or delete
  '-a' applies a snapshot (revert disk to saved state)
  '-c' creates a snapshot
  '-d' deletes a snapshot
  '-l' lists all snapshots in the given image

A RedHat system leverages the easy to use virt-manager gui application with the slightly more involved libvirt hypervisor to bring kvm+qemu virtualized quests to life.

Edit Not that RedHat/Fedora distros are the only ones out there including libvirt, kvm, qemu, etc. I'm just saying that RedHat/Fedora being the point of development for those technologies means you're getting the technologies on the platform they were developed around from the company they were developed in.

Tim Bielawa

Posted 2010-11-04T03:52:57.183

Reputation: 990